Fiendish Schemes Page 28

  However that might be, such considerations failed to assist me in my present circumstance. Even if I were to consider my promise to the late, drowned daughter of Lord Fusible to have been fulfilled by my simply having made my way to the address she had given me and extending an offer of aid, subsequently refused, to her beloved captain, I could foresee certain personal difficulties if I were to leave him at this dire scene. Witnesses already existed, in the form of the two scavengers I had encountered upon first regaining consciousness after my immersion in the river, who could testify as to my wishing to find this address; there were likely others who had observed my traversing the dark alley and heading up the rickety staircase to this floor. Even if they did not know my name, they might be able to give a description sufficient for the Metropolitan Police force to track me down elsewhere.

  And of course, none of that would be necessary for the authorities’ punitive purposes, with Captain Crowcroft sitting here waiting for their arrival. I could hardly rely upon him not to blurt out that a certain George Dower had visited him in his distress, then fled the premises in such a manner as to indicate some guilty association with these sanguinary events. Even if I were inclined to violate the late Evangeline’s trust by going down to the street, hailing the first constable I might see, and reporting Crowcroft as a murderer, that would hardly dissipate the predicament in which I found myself. Two thoughts prompted this realization: first, that the authorities would have the keenest and most unwelcome curiosity as to exactly how I had stumbled upon this room otherwise occluded to respectable persons; and second, I was technically already a fugitive from justice, being implicated in the explosion at Parliament which had enabled my escape into the Thames. Considering all these things, I could deduce that the prospect of my continuing freedom would best be served by convincing the recalcitrant Crowcroft to accompany me in as hasty a removal from the premises as possible—

  “Listen to me, Dower.” His words broke in on my desperate musing. “I must make confession to some other human being, tempted as I am to take my own life as final payment for my sins.”

  “Is that really necessary?” I attempted to calculate whether leaving two corpses here, his and that of the unfortunate woman upon the blood-soaked bed, would be favourable to me or not. Perhaps the investigating authorities would conclude that he had been the author of the unfortunate woman’s death, then his own, motivated by some sense of wretched remorse. But then, with the course in which my own fortunes had been unfolding, it would be just as likely that the police would conclude that I had done in both of them, to use the criminal parlance. Unable to reach a conclusion, I pleaded for him to reconsider this unfortunate desire. “I feel that we are a trifle pressed for time.”

  Selfishly concerned only for himself, Crowcroft ignored my protests.

  “She who most loves me—I speak naturally of my fiancée, Evangeline—”

  Out of consideration for his disordered feelings, I thought it only wise to continue my silence as regarding the poor girl’s death. He obviously had enough on his mind as it was.

  “She was entirely correct,” he continued, “to be concerned about my welfare. I am aware that she spoke to you, amongst others, about such well-merited concerns on her part. In her womanly heart, she had perceived that my involvement with the walking lights, by which I had achieved such renown, had led to a similar overpowering interest in those innovative technologies by which they had come into this seafaring nation’s service. In short, I had become—this I admit, wretch that I am!—a full-fledged devotee of all things steam-powered.”

  His confession failed to surprise me. It seemed no more than admitting that he was but one of many, all of whom had fallen into the widespread mania afflicting these sad times.

  “My obsession soon spiraled out of control.” Nothing, it seemed, would prevent Captain Crowcroft from making an exhausting display of his various failings. “This is why you have found me in this sordid district. Despite my being affianced to one whose every virtue and charm should have prevailed at keeping me chaste until the night of our wedding, I plummeted first into dalliance, then patronage, and at last a complete and heedless addiction to . . .”

  He fell silent, as though his shame were too much for his tongue to relate.

  “Please go on,” I said. “We really don’t have all day.”

  “To . . .” His stricken whisper reluctantly emerged from his lips. “To . . . the valve girls.”

  “Indeed.” I confess that the designation was a novelty to me, though I fully anticipated that a complete exposition of its meaning would be something unseemly. “And what exactly are they?”

  “You don’t know?” His gaze swung up to my face. “Fortunate man!”

  “I don’t know how accurate is that assessment. A certain amount of troubles have been my lot in life, even if they haven’t included an encounter with this particular distaff tribe.”

  “Maintain your innocence, Dower, if you value your soul—or even merely your ability to sleep at night, undisturbed by dreams both lustful and self-indicting.”

  “Well . . .” His warning irked me somewhat. “Not that it should be any of your concern, but I’ve never been greatly tempted along those lines—not from any great pretense to virtue, but just as general inclination.”

  “Do you . . .” An odd glint appeared in his narrowed eyes as he leaned forward in his chair. “Wish to know more?”

  “Concerning what?”

  “The valve girls, you fool. What else?”

  “If I must.” It seemed obvious to me that there would be no flight from the blood-soaked room until he had finished imparting every unsavory detail to me. “Proceed.”

  The man made a visible effort to pull himself together, so urgent was his self-imposed obligation to unburden his soul to me.

  “There are,” said Crowcroft, “some matters which I am sure I do not need to explicate in laborious detail . . .”

  I could not refrain from thinking to myself, Thank God for that.

  “Matters of a more . . . delicate nature,” he continued. “I know that you are, as the saying goes, a man of the world.”

  “Perhaps not as much as you might think.” A suspicion arose as to where Crowcroft might be heading with his comments. “My reputation along those lines has been greatly exaggerated in various circles.”

  “I can well understand your wish to minimize such things. Not everyone would look with as much tolerance as I do, upon your carnal interest in mechanical Orang-Utans.”

  “Now that is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about. I assure you that I never—”

  He bulled right past, unmindful of my protests. “So I feel safe in assuming that you are familiar with that which is known as fex—not merely the business enterprise which goes by that name, but the larger and more encompassing topic as well.”

  “Much more so than I would ever have wanted to.”

  “The valve girls are, as you might already have surmised, part of that darkly alluring world. Women who, either at their own mercantile initiative or that of the swaggering bullies who subsist upon their illicit earnings, are fexually modified to suit their customers’ degenerate tastes—which, alas, had become my own.”

  “Why valve, though?” I distracted myself with this etymological musing. “Seems an odd choice of words.”

  “If you were as familiar with the workings of modern machinery as I am, Dower, you would be aware of that component apparatus which is technically known as the valve gear, which is the mechanism in an engine that operates the inlet and exhaust valves to admit steam into the cylinder and allow exhaust steam to escape. While I am no lexicographer, it seems to me but a simple extension from the mechanical to the physiological—the essential part of these prostitutes’ surgically altered anatomies is known to jaded connoisseurs such as myself, naturally enough, as the valva—”

  “You really needn’t have told me all that. I could have done without.”

  “And by equal l
ogic, the purchased act of coitus with such a steam-powered female is known by us as a valve job.”

  “As I said.” Once begun, there seemed no end of off- putting revelations from him. “To be frank, I find all this to be so thoroughly unpleasant, I can scarcely imagine how one of presumably normal appetites could become an enthusiast of such deviancies.”

  “MacDuff.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I thought that perhaps Crowcroft was making some manner of Shakespearean allusion.

  “He is the one responsible—Duncan MacDuff. The secretive own er of the Fex establishment. It was through his enticements, personally directed toward me, that I was lured into this depraved milieu.”

  Again I heard that name, which Ms. Stromneth had mentioned when explaining that she was but Fex’s manageress and public face, operating at the behest of those others hidden by a concealing corporate veil.

  “This MacDuff person must be greatly seductive—depending, of course, upon one’s natural inclinations. I doubt if he would have been able to cozen me in a similar manner.”

  “Count yourself fortunate,” said Crowcroft, “that you have never met the man. He has a forceful character, to say the least. And more—he has a compelling vision of the Future.”

  “Everybody seems to have as much, these days.” I gave a shrug. “The late Stonebrake could hardly be silenced about the topic of those things he so greatly desired to come about in our world.”

  “You misunderstand me.” The lighthouse captain gave me a look both dismissive and pitying. “I mean that MacDuff sees the Future— literally. And in elaborately convincing detail. He does not merely wish for certain things to come, he knows that they will.”

  “If you say so,” I replied. “I have known similar Nostradamus- like prognosticators; they were all rogues. There must be something about knowing the Future—or at least claiming to—that attracts a certain devious mind. Perhaps honest people content themselves with merely facing the actual, knowable Present. Be that as it may, I’m hardly lording it over you by pointing out the unlikelihood of my falling for such a rhetorical devil. As I said, I have the advantage of prior experience along these lines.”

  “Ah—but you have not met his even more convincing partner.”

  “So I haven’t.” I recalled that there was more than one individual jointly pulling the strings behind the façade of the Fex enterprise. “And what is his name?”

  “Her name, actually. MacDuff’s business partner is a woman who goes by the nom d’artiste of Valvienne.”

  “Hm. Yes, I had heard tell of a female companion. I suppose this obvious pseudonym is somehow rudely appropriate, given her line of work—I mean, with these so-called valve girls of which you have informed me.”

  “Just so,” said Crowcroft. “Valvienne styles herself as the designer of the various fexual modifications which are then purveyed to Fex’s well-moneyed clients. Her malignant influence is then transmitted to the lower classes, including the unfortunate valve girls, who imitate their betters by inflicting similar disfigurements upon themselves, either by their own hands or those of various discredited surgeons who wield scalpel and chloroform in order to finance their own low tastes—chiefly gin and music hall performers, I’ve been given to understand.”

  “And this is the person under whose spell you have fallen?”

  “Both persons,” he amended. “It is the combination of them, acting in tandem, that renders them so persuasive. She enables, to a fierce degree, his verbal legerdemain—as I said, Valvienne is the designer, whereas her consort, MacDuff, would be more properly considered the promoter. Thus they do not operate as seedy procurers, but instead derive their ill-gotten profits by supplying the steam-powered apparatuses demanded by their jaded customers.”

  “It would have gone better for you if you had ceased all contact with the pair, as soon as you had discerned their true nature.”

  “Better if I had never met their acquaintance at all!” Face contorted with emotion, Crowcroft ran his hands through his equally disordered hair. “For my fall from grace was as precipitous as those original sinners cast from the Garden, an event also resulting from such serpentine blandishments. For as my newly inculcated obsessions advanced, I rapidly descended into the darker aspects of this appalling world. I confess that I began neglecting my duties as a lighthouse commander—as well as withdrawing my attentions from the one who is most deserving of them, my fiancée, Evangeline.”

  “Comfort yourself, man—she had not forgotten you. I am here at her urging, to offer what assistance I might to you in your hour of need.”

  “Too late! I fear that I am irrevocably lost to these lusts, both fleshly and vaporous. The hours and money that I spent on my fexual mania have yielded tragic results.”

  “Yes, I rather see that.”

  “More so,” said Crowcroft, “than you perceive—or that I can even remember! I have no memory of what happened in this room. All that persists in my jumbled thoughts is the dim recollection of getting soddenly drunk at one of this district’s low dens, as I have done so with increasing frequency, then picking up one of these loathsome valve girls from the street beyond and bringing her here—then it all goes blank!”

  “Perhaps it is fortunate for you that it does. From the looks of things, it couldn’t have been very pleasant.”

  “Pray do not mock me, Dower. Can you not imagine the horror I felt when I regained consciousness—and discovered the lifeless body of the poor woman there on the bed?”

  “It would require a bit of an effort on my part. I have enough problems as it is.”

  “Would that you had been the constables instead, so that I might have been dragged away to a fitting punishment.” Crowcroft covered his eyes with one trembling hand, while with the other he pointed to the sagging bed at the other side of the room. “The image of my crime is emblazoned in my vision, never to depart!”

  So engrossed had I been in the lighthouse captain’s exposition, despite my initial reluctance to hear it, that I had forgotten for the moment about the lifeless body that was the chamber’s other occupant. The motion of Crowcroft’s outflung hand directed my own involuntary gaze toward the grisly scene—

  Which now seemed to complicate matters a great deal, and in a manner unanticipated by me.

  For while the bed was still soaked in blood, no unclothed body lay upon it, fatally hacked or not. While Crowcroft and I had discussed these grim affairs, the chief evidence for them had somehow gotten up and walked away.

  If it had ever been there at all. . . .

  CHAPTER

  20

  Old Acquaintances

  Are Met Again

  A NUMBER of speculations rapidly coursed through my thoughts, in regard to this latest mysterious occurrence.

  “I had been under the impression that the unfortunate woman was deceased.” I pointed to the bed, its mattress still soaked with blood but now otherwise vacant. “Or so it appeared to me.”

  “So she was—I assure you of that.” Captain Crowcroft stared at the aspect before us, his eyes widening with incomprehension. “This is terrible, Dower. All is now lost.”

  “Do you think so? I confess that I see it rather differently.” However it had happened, the disappearance of such a dire piece of incriminating evidence as a murdered body struck me as a happy circumstance. Crowcroft and I had been so engrossed in our conversation, with all its references to valve girls and the malign influence of the previously unnamed and enigmatic Duncan MacDuff and his partner, Valvienne, that if some degree of animation had remained in the prostitute, despite her apparent wounds, she might very well have been able to resurrect herself from the scene of whatever crime had taken place and exit from the room, all unnoticed by us. The room and the corridor beyond were so enshrouded in darkness that the door might well have been stealthily opened without either Crowcroft or myself being aware of it, the sound of its latch and hinges disguised by those creaking noises common to ancient, dilapidated buildings suc
h as this. Nor might anyone else have taken notice, for that matter. In this district, a naked and bloodied woman emerging from one of the ramshackle buildings, then disappearing into the night, very likely happened so frequently that it caused relatively small comment amongst the locals.

  Alternately, if the woman had indeed been as lifeless as both Crowcroft and I had surmised, some other party might have surreptitiously entered the room and carried the body from it. My understanding was that there was still a flourishing trade in providing fresh subjects for dissection to the less scrupulous medical schools in the city. Prowling about for additional commerce, any number of stealthy body-snatchers might have glanced inside the room, ascertained that the attention of both Crowcroft and myself had been absorbed elsewhere, entered, and then absconded with the poor woman’s remains. To my mind, if they had in fact done so, they might very well have provided to us a favor—

  Or not. As I reviewed these possibilities, a dismaying clamour arose from downstairs. I could hear the thudding of booted feet upon the rickety wooden steps and the shouting of various gruff voices, including that of one with the evident tone of command, directing the others.

  “The police!” Crowcroft raised his head, having come to the same quick conclusion that I had. “We’ve been discovered—”

  “Not yet.” From the sounds below, it seemed as if the officers were intent upon searching the rooms of the floor beneath us, kicking open doors as they proceeded. “We must make haste, though.”